It had been a long road, with more than its fair share of bumps along the way, but it was all about to be worth it. By the time the sun was high in the sky, their enterprise would have taken a massive step forward. He turned to look back at the sea once more. In thirty minutes, a luxury yacht containing seventy-two bales of the purest Colombian cocaine would be offshore. Their contacts had insisted on coming in at dawn, which made unexpected sense. Any activities that happened at night were suspicious almost by definition; the first light of dawn was when the good people went about their industry. In this case, their speedboat would be bringing ashore enough coke to dominate the Irish market indefinitely and make some very serious friends over the Irish Sea. Tommy already had two names, one in Liverpool and one in Glasgow, who would eagerly take large chunks of the shipment off his hands. Gerry Fallon had spent the last decade establishing himself as the undisputed kingpin of the Irish market, but that was about to change – and fast. He would live to regret trying to burn down Tommy Carter’s house, but he would not live to regret it long.
After he had concluded the morning’s business, Tommy would disappear for a couple of days. Unless they wanted to charge him with anything, the Gardaí wouldn’t even get to hear his alibi as to where he had been. Needless to say, it had been put in place months ago and refreshed given the current circumstance. It would just be a matter of waiting the Gardaí out. They had nothing, and what is more, with dirty cops having tried to ambush O’Donnell and Franko, they might soon realise that looking too hard at the evidence might lead somewhere they didn’t want to go. Carter smiled to himself. If his opponents hadn’t got greedy, he would probably have been behind bars by now. A valuable lesson. From now on, he would be one step removed from the action – once this deal had been made and his future secured.
Brònchluich Beach had been his most careful selection. Never one of Donegal’s most scenic beaches, it might get some customers on a Saturday in August but on an early morning in December it should remain deserted. Two miles from the nearest house, it was of no interest to joggers, fishermen or anyone else. And if that were to change, Tommy had some hi-vis jackets in the boot and a plausible story about a water pollution warning.
He looked to his right, where the beach sloped upwards to become a gorse-topped cliff, waves crashing against the rocks beneath it. In the summer, according to his research, local youths often dared each other to take the fifty-foot leap from the cliff’s edge into the waves below. That had stopped a couple of years ago after a tragedy had left a Spanish exchange student in a wheelchair. Now there were signs warning of a dangerous drop, and some fencing to prevent anyone from taking the required run-up. There had once been a lighthouse at the top but it had been knocked down in the Eighties as unsafe, and now a meteorological measuring station perched up there, looking like an overly ambitious child’s science project. The fact that it hadn’t been vandalised proved the location’s remoteness from the curiosities of local youth, now that reckless self-endangerment was no longer possible.
The Moran situation had been a disappointment. He and O’Donnell had quietly discussed his behaviour several times over the last year. He was too flashy, and the last thing their organisation needed was a big mouth. All the time they had served together in the army had made O’Donnell deeply reluctant to deal with Jimmy Moran. Even after he had taken a bullet in the thigh in the ambush, O’Donnell had tried to make the case that the leak might not be Moran. Still, Moran’s death had given Tommy just what he needed – a way out from under the surveillance. It had required him making at least a temporary ally of the IRA, but it had been worth it. He had taken a grim satisfaction in turning the loss of Moran into a win. The leak was plugged and they had made the Gardaí look like fools yet again. As for O’Donnell, well . . .
Tommy heard an engine behind him and turned to see a blue van appearing from behind the line of sand dunes. It was really more of a one-lane track than a road, skirting the bottom of the slope that lead up to the cliff before meandering down to the beach, but it served their purpose. Tommy looked at his watch. Exactly on time. The van pulled up behind his jeep on the jetty, and Franko Doyle opened the door and got out.
“Any problems?”
“No, Tommy, all good. Picked up the van just where you said it would be. Any contact with the boat?”
“Ship.”
“What?”
“It’s a ship, Franko. A vessel of its size is a ship. The launch that’ll be pulling up is a boat though.”
“Whatever. Any word?”
Tommy shook his head. “No, but then there’s not supposed to be. Radio silence. Don’t worry, everything is in hand. You just be ready to do the unloading.”
“So,” said Franko, leaning back on the front of his van, his hands nonchalantly in his pockets, “you’ve got the diamonds then?”
“You’ve an awful lot of questions this morning, Franko.”
“Course I do. I’m in this too, you know. There’s only you and me left, Tommy, you need to stop with all this secrecy bollocks.”
Carter gave Franko a long, hard look and then pulled his jacket around himself tighter. “Yes, Franko, I’ve not turned up to the drug deal without the necessary. I don’t have a death wish.”
Franko stretched his arms out as if to yawn and then snatched the handgun from his overcoat pocket. “Glad to hear it, now give me the stones.”
Tommy stayed still, looking Franko directly in the eye. “Uncle Franko, I do hope this is some kind of a joke.”
Franko smiled at him. “Do I look like I’m laughing?”
“And after all I’ve done for you.”
“Oh please. Treating me like your lackey, always thinking you’re so bleedin’ smart. You’re an obnoxious little prick and you always were.”
The back doors of the van opened and Detective Tim “Gringo” Spain got out on the left side, his gun pointed at Tommy’s head, quickly followed by the similarly armed Detective Sergeant Jessica Cunningham, who took up station on the other side of the van.
“I see you’ve brought your new friends, Franko.”
“Yeah,” said Franko. “Not so clever now, are you, Tommy?”
“No, I guess I’m not. I honestly didn’t think a man I’d known since birth, who my father called his brother, could so easily betray me.”
Franko spat on the ground. “Oh please. You betrayed your da a long time before I did. Or have you told him you’re going into the drug-dealing business?”
Tommy shrugged. “You should know, Franko, O’Donnell always thought it was you – the leak, I mean.” As he spoke, Tommy looked in turn at the three guns trained on him and the eyes behind them. “I actually defended you. You did a very good job of setting Moran up, I’ll give you that. More subtlety there than I would expect from you.”
“It’s a bit late to try and butter me up.”
“Oh no,” said Tommy, with a slight laugh, “I was just explaining. You see, I promised John that, if I was wrong, he could deal with you personally.”
“What a shame then that he died before he had the chance. I’d have loved to deal with that arsehole and all.”
“Died? Where did you hear that he had died?”
“You told me.”
“Did I?” Tommy smiled again. “Well, that must’ve been the truth. We don’t lie to each other, do we, Uncle Franko? But could you imagine? Imagine that, right now, you’re bang in the sights of a world-class sniper whose best friend you had killed. That wouldn’t be fun, would it?”
“Bullshit.”
Tommy could see Franko resisting the urge to look around. A bead of sweat was trickling down his forehead. He blinked twice. Tommy was aware of the cops behind Franko nervously scanning the horizon. The dunes, the cliffs, the sea.
The moment continued to stretch out around them. Nothing happened.
“Any last words, Uncle Franko?”
Franko licked his lips nervously and then curled them into a sneer. “You’re full of shit, Tommy. T
hinking you’re some kind of la-di-da genius. You’re just trying to mess with me head—”
It was an unfortunate choice of words, as a fraction of a second later, Franko Doyle’s head exploded.
A bullet from an Accuracy International Arctic Warfare bolt-action sniper rifle can comfortably take out a target at a range of eight hundred and seventy yards in the hands of an expert. At a range of less than two hundred yards, and in the hands of John O’Donnell, Franko Doyle’s fate had been sealed since the moment he pointed his gun at Tommy Carter. O’Donnell slammed the bolt action back, and loaded his next bullet.
Gringo dived for cover behind the van and heard Jessica Cunningham do the same. As he looked around, he saw Tommy Carter disappearing behind his jeep. But he was not their biggest concern right now. They needed to find cover from the sniper. The problem was that unless you knew where the danger was coming from, cover wasn’t cover. Apart from the two vehicles, they were forty metres from any other protection. It might as well have been a mile.
“Where the hell is he?” said Cunningham, from the far side of the van, panic in her voice.
“I dunno.”
Gringo scanned the dunes at the end of the beach. In films, you would see a reflection off a telescopic sight or at least the flash of a muzzle, but he doubted John O’Donnell was dumb enough to make a simple mistake, and a muzzle flash would almost certainly mean it was too late.
Gringo looked down at Franko – or rather, at what remained of him. He had fallen to the left, in the direction of Gringo’s side of the van, so . . .
He heard the sharp thud of a bullet hitting the other side of the van followed a half a second later by the report of the shot. Then came the thump of Jessica Cunningham’s body hitting the ground.
“Jessica?”
Gringo spotted movement in the corner of his right eye, and let loose a couple of shots to send Tommy Carter diving back behind his jeep. A bullet whistled off to Gringo’s left in response. Gringo’s heart was pounding so hard, it felt like it might erupt from his chest. O’Donnell must be to their right up on the cliffs. Which meant he had an elevated angle on the beach.
“Throw down your gun and you’ll live, Detective.”
“Fair enough, Tommy, sounds reasonable.”
Carter’s head briefly appeared around the front bumper of the jeep and then disappeared just as quickly as a bullet thunked into the front wheel.
“I think you’ve got a flat, Tommy.”
“Very funny, Detective Spain. O’Donnell wants you to know – he’s hoping to shoot you somewhere that’ll cause you to die a slow and painful death.”
“Honestly,” said Gringo, “you shoot a guy in the leg – once – and he really takes it personally.”
Several hundred yards away, a sheep was calmly regarding a figure crouched down beside it, holding a pair of binoculars. This was an unusual sight in the sheep’s world but, as it appeared to be neither a threat nor edible, the sheep opened its mouth and resumed chewing on some grass.
There was a loud cracking noise in the distance. It was beyond the sheep’s field of reference, but it was the sound of a shot from an Accuracy International Arctic Warfare bolt-action sniper rifle.
“Ah, shittin’ Nora on a lilo.”
The figure rushed back to his vehicle, which allowed the sheep to carry on with its business in peace.
It was too quiet.
Gringo flattened himself against the ground as silently as he could. He couldn’t see anything beneath the van. There was no movement by the jeep either. He tried not to look at the body of Jessica Cunningham, motionless beside the rear driver’s-side tyre of the van. Her body was crumpled, as if she were nothing more than a dolly callously dropped by a bored child.
The wind blew in from the sea, the cold breeze whipping the scents of salt air and seaweed around him. Gringo ran his gaze back and forth, the grip of his Glock 22 pistol moist with sweat. He tried to keep his breathing steady. Tried to think. The only thought that occurred to him was that, right now, John O’Donnell could be calmly making his way through the dunes, looking for an angle. If he was lucky, Gringo wouldn’t even have time to realise before the bullet hit.
The silence was becoming oppressive.
A flash of movement, then the front windscreen of the van shattered as a sniper round ripped through it. Glass tinkled down around Gringo. He saw the feet of Tommy Carter quickly stepping over Jessica Cunningham’s body. Gringo squeezed off three quick shots beneath the underside of the van and Tommy Carter screamed. His body hit the concrete and he rolled, instinctively firing off a couple of shots in response.
Another sheep stood halfway up the slope that led to the top of the cliff. She had been standing at the top, perusing the gorse bushes when a loud noise had issued from the piece of nearby ground that wasn’t ground and it had frightened her and the other two sheep off. Her brethren had scattered down below but she had become distracted by a tempting tuft of grass.
Another loud noise came from atop the cliff, but she wasn’t so bothered any more. It was further away and it was starting to lose its shock value.
Then there came the roar of a ferocious-sounding beast. The sheep turned to see something large, black and angry careening off the one-lane road and heading straight for her. The sheep didn’t know it, but it was a 1983 Porsche 928S, with black paint and a red leather interior. Sheep may not be nature’s greatest survivors, but an instinct nevertheless grabbed her and she started running as fast as she could back up the slope.
Above her, the ground that wasn’t the ground suddenly stood up.
John O’Donnell had been trained not to get distracted, to live in the moment that existed only when staring down the sights of a rifle. An old instructor used to put himself an inch from his ear and scream all manner of abuse at him while he calmly picked out and dispatched assigned targets on a range.
Still, in the back of his mind, his inner sentry screamed the alarm. O’Donnell withdrew his right eye from the sight and opened the left one. He looked down the slope to see the improbable spectacle of a black Porsche bumping messily up the hill towards him. A panicked sheep rushed along in front of it, inadvertently leading a charge it wanted no part of.
O’Donnell dropped to a knee – clumsily, due to the wound in his right thigh – and put a bullet left of centre through the windscreen, shattering it before passing through the tacky red leather of the driver’s headrest.
There was nobody in the driver’s seat.
Quickly and smoothly, O’Donnell slammed the bolt back and loaded another round. After a moment’s thought, he attempted to put it through the engine block of the car. The car bounced up on the uneven ground and the bullet instead passed through the number plate.
The sheep rushed by O’Donnell as he dived to his right, the car narrowly missing him as it destroyed £327 of Irish Meteorological Service monitoring equipment.
The sheep, having found herself somehow trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea, stopped at the edge of the cliff and looked in horror at the rocks below. The 1983 Porsche 928S, with black paint and a red leather interior, had no such moment of existential crisis as, with a defiant roar, it threw itself off the cliff towards the unsuspecting sea below.
The sheep bounced up onto the bonnet and for a moment found herself standing on top of the beast. Then she was flying, which is an unusual state of affairs for a sheep.
John O’Donnell watched the car as it sailed off into the sea, a surprised sheep bouncing over its bonnet. He started getting to his feet to look over the edge.
Ninety seconds before, Bunny McGarry had found himself with no weapon. At least in the technical sense.
He was, through his job, allowed and often required to carry a gun. Unfortunately, that gun was in the locked cabinet in their squad’s office, as he was technically on leave.
He did own a derringer, but he had possessed only one bullet for that and it had already been used. In all honesty – though he hadn’t admitt
ed it – he had been pleasantly shocked it had worked at all. If he was to be of any use in this situation, he would have to metaphorically pull something out of his arse, as opposed to literally.
He had nothing, save a car that for once wasn’t in the shop and a hurling stick. To be fair, he had frequently used the hurley as a weapon – it worked well in close combat situations. It was, however, singularly unhelpful in a battle with a sniper. Actually, that was not entirely fair. Broken in half, it had held down the accelerator pedal on his 1983 Porsche 928S, allowing him to crouch down in the passenger seat and lean across to work the clutch pedal with his right hand and the gearstick with his left. He had used the belt off his trousers to tie the steering wheel into a fixed position as, ducked down as he was, steering was not much of an option. He had to hope his initial aim was good. He had managed to get the car up into third, roaring unhappily as it hurtled off the cliff, as if attempting an impractical bid to be the first car to jump the Atlantic Ocean.
Bunny didn’t actually see the car leaving the ground, having rolled out of the passenger door moments before. Rocks bit at him and gorse bushes ripped at his skin, but he had no time for that. He was on his feet as quickly as possible and running.
John O’Donnell saw him coming and began turning, his sniper rifle still in his hands.
Somewhere in Bunny’s mind, the calculation must have occurred without him being consciously aware of it. His opponent had a sniper rifle and undoubtedly a sidearm. He was highly skilled in both armed and unarmed combat. Though he had a wounded leg, the advantage still very definitely lay with the ex-Army Ranger.
That was why, as O’Donnell had almost completed his turn and was bringing his rifle up onto his shoulder, Bunny lowered his, extended his arms out and executed a perfect hip-height rugby tackle on his opponent. He did not bring his opponent safely to the ground, however, as the momentum carried them both off the cliff.
Angels in the Moonlight_A prequel to The Dublin Trilogy Page 28